3. Enforcing Interconnection Timelines

You Snooze, You Lose: Enforcing Interconnection Timelines for Everyone Involved

In the third article in IREC’s grid interconnection series on GreenTech Media, Erica McConnell, former special counsel and Laura Beaton, associate with Shute, Mihaly and Weinberger LLP, attorneys for IREC, look at how to make deadlines matter.

Deadlines keep the world on track. They are the metric by which we manage our time, determine priorities and assess progress — though some people are better at meeting them than others.

Among the many rules governing the electricity grid, there are innumerable timelines, deadlines and enforcement mechanisms in place to ensure the grid keeps humming along, providing safe and reliable electricity to the masses. Yet the surge of requests to connect new distributed energy resources to the grid and the resulting queue backlogs have revealed that states may be falling short when it comes to enforcing relevant timelines and deadlines for interconnection.

In the previous article in this series, we discussed the important role of clear and explicit interconnection timelines for expeditiously processing the increasing volume of applicants seeking to connect to the grid. But what good are timelines if they’re not followed? And how do you make sure that everyone — both applicants and utilities — does what they’re supposed to do on time?

The key is having clear rules for enforcement that avoid confusion and keep the interconnection queue moving.